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Although women's police centers have been gaining popularity as a measure to address domestic violence, to date no quantitative evaluations of their impacts on the incidence of domestic violence or any other manifestations of gender equality have been done. This paper estimates the effects of women's police stations in Brazil on female homicides, as a measure of the most severe form of domestic violence. Given that a high fraction of female deaths among women ages 15 to 49 years can be attributed to aggression by an intimate partner, female homicides appear the best available proxy for severe domestic violence considering the scarcity of data on domestic violence. The paper uses a panel of 2,074 municipalities and takes advantage of the gradual rollout of women's police stations from 2004 to 2009, to estimate the effect of establishing a women's police station on the municipal female homicide rate. Although the analysis does not find an association on average, women's police stations appear to be highly effective among some groups of women: women living in metropolitan areas and younger women. Establishing a women's police station in a metropolitan municipality is associated with a reduction in the homicide rate by 1.23 deaths per 100,000 women (which roughly amounts to a 17 percent reduction in the average homicide rate in metropolitan municipalities). The reduction in the homicide rate of women ages 15 to 24 is even higher: 5.57 deaths per 100,000 women. Qualitative work suggests that better economic opportunities and less traditional social norms in metropolitan areas may explain the heterogeneous impacts of women's police stations in metropolitan areas and outside them.

Adolescent health --- Domestic violence --- Gender --- Gender & development --- Gender & health --- Gender & law --- Health, nutrition and population --- Population policies --- Women's police stations

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The relationship between intimate partner violence and cash transfer programs has been extensively researched, with a consensus that cash transfers are most likely to reduce intimate partner violence. This study uses a regression discontinuity design to examine the effects of a conditional cash transfer program in the Philippines on three types of gender-based violence: (i) intimate partner violence, (ii) domestic violence by non-partners (such as husband's relatives), and (iii) violence outside home. Although the study finds no significant change in intimate partner violence or violence outside of home, it finds a measurable decline in non-partner domestic violence. The study also examines mediating channels through which conditional cash transfers may affect gender-based violence, proposed in earlier literature, namely: (i) stress reduction due to higher income, (ii) increase in women's empowerment, (iii) increase in women's bargaining power, and (iv) strengthened social networks. The findings provide suggestive evidence of changes in all four mitigating channels. This evidence confirms the potential of conditional cash transfer programs to mitigate gender-based violence beyond intimate partner violence, but indicate that depending on the context, additional interventions may be needed to address specific types of gender-based violence.

Gender-based violence.

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At 50.9 percent, female labor force participation in Indonesia is far below the regional average of 60.8 percent. Is it being hindered by a lack of affordable childcare services in the country? This paper exploits the joint variations in preschool age eligibility and access to preschool across regions and over years in a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework. With a longitudinal survey that tracks individuals for an average of 22 years, a panel of mothers was constructed to estimate the elasticity of maternal employment to preschool access. The analysis finds that an additional public preschool per 1,000 children increases the work participation of mothers of preschool age eligible children by 11-16 percent from the baseline mean. Private preschools do not increase work participation at the extensive margin, but they increase the likelihood of holding a second job. The availability of preschools induces mothers to informal sector occupations that do not require full-time commitments.

Access to Education --- Childcare --- Employment and Unemployment --- Female Labor Force Participation --- Gender --- Gender and Development --- Gender and Economics --- Gender Innovation Lab --- Labor Markets --- Maternal Employment --- Poverty Reduction --- Preschool --- Social Protections and Labor

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Teenage pregnancy has been a cause of concern for policy makers because it is associated with a complex and often adverse social context for women. It is seen as the cause of lower social and economic achievement for mothers and their children, and as the potential determinant of inter-generational poverty traps. However, the question of whether pregnancy-and the subsequent rearing of a child-is actually the trigger of poverty, higher dependence on social welfare and/ or other undesirable social and economic consequences has not been studied in developing countries with enough rigor to establish a causal relation. This paper follows a methodology previously applied in the United States, using Mexican data from the National Survey of Demographic Dynamics, to exploit information about miscarriages as an instrument to identify the long-term consequences of early child bearing. Thus, the paper takes the advantage of a natural experiment: it compares the outcomes of women who became pregnant in adolescence, and gave birth, to outcomes of women who became pregnant in adolescence and miscarried. This approach only allows for estimating the costs of adolescent childbearing for teenagers in a risk group, that is, teenagers who are likely to experience a pregnancy. The results are consistent with findings in the United States, suggesting that, contrary to popular thinking, adolescent childbearing does not hamper significantly the lifelong opportunities of the young mothers. Actually, women who gave birth during their adolescence have on average 0.34 more years of education, and are 21 percentage points more likely to be employed, compared with their counterparts who miscarried. The results also suggest, however, greater dependence on social welfare among women who gave birth during adolescence: their social assistance income is 36 percent higher, and they are more likely to participate in social programs, especially the conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades.

Adolescent Health --- Gender and Health --- Gender and Law --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Natural experiment --- Population Policies --- Poverty Reduction --- Poverty traps --- Reproductive Health --- Teenage pregnancy --- Welfare

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The literature lends empirical support for the idea that improvements to transport infrastructure lead to economic development. How and why the benefits of better transport differ between genders is less clear. This paper attempts to answer this question by combining a nonexperimental impact evaluation of a large-scale rural roads project in Vietnam with qualitative data collection. The paper finds that roads improve economic opportunities for agricultural production and trade: all households increase agricultural trade. Yet only households headed by men capitalize on these opportunities, experiencing an increase in agricultural output and income. Production and income do not increase in households headed by women. The result seems to be driven by a lower level of household labor and access to capital in female-headed households, which constrains their ability to make up-front investments to increase production and income. Overall, the results indicate that female-headed households face constraints in taking advantage of newly created economic opportunities. Coordinating transport investments with complementary development programs addressing these constraints can improve the benefits of better transport for such households.

Gender --- Mixed Methods --- Roads --- Rural Roads --- Transport